Create value for others and don’t worry about the returns
geohot.github.io
geohot.github.io
He is specifically talking about AI, and saying (in my understanding) that you shouldn’t worry too much about whether your specific thing will be overwritten by AI, as long as you focus on actually creating true, real value with your work.
I agree with that completely and can see it happening in my own field (marketing/tech writing.)
Yes, theoretically AI can replace every writer and marketer. The functionality is there.
No, this isn’t actually happening, because what’s mattered all along isn’t a generic marketing skill set; but the mental effort to actually provide value. No one wants to read a blog post by an AI because it’s boring, and the writers that actually have something of value in their writing are doing just fine.
If you are but still get canned, then you’re just dealing with irrational management, and that predates AI.
The higher-end of markets aren’t immune to this. As the demand for lower-level workers drops, people will upskill trying to move up rather than get lopped off. Since there are fewer positions the further up the hierarchy you get, you don’t need a huge increase in supply to affect demand. That’s when you start seeing the most experienced, highest-earning people getting shit-canned because someone is willing to do a good-enough version of their role for 2/3 their sizable salary.
This can all happen without a single entire role being completely automated out of existence.
actually, it's AI that will be doing the predating
Businesses want worker fungibility and to reduce bus favor from having single point of failures. That usually, but not always, flies in the face of irreplaceability.
Employees in knowledge work don’t generate constant value at all times. And companies want value at all times (that needs to be ever increasing). You’re not disposable at all point in time if you’re providing value at that point in time.
But employers think it is, and are falling for the hype and are affecting engineers left and right regardless.
Whether I'm wrong or they're wrong is immaterial.
They're still replacing SWEs with AI.
I'm sorry but this is simply false. Nothing has really changed on the ground for SWEs. Nothing at all. Compensation is still sky high. Interviews are still the same. Career progression is the same. Everything takes the same amount of time. It's all business as usual for software engineering as a profession. AI is just one more tool in the toolkit; some devs use it, some don't. No engineering org has fallen for any hype in a meaningful way. Ultimately SWE teams on the frontline are busy doing what they always do, mostly in the way that they've always been doing.
The only thing that's changed in a remarkable way is how disconnected the rhetoric on social media is from ground reality. Anyone telling you AI is even replacing 5% of SWEs in the industry is a jobless hack.
That's not remotely what I'm hearing or seeing from those who are on the job market.
The professional guilds are sounding the alarms, because there aren’t enough translators qualifying.
And we're at the point where you have to essentially choose the factually wrong point of view so there's no worth in even listing the counter examples.
There used to be many site aggregators curated by people for different categories - kind of like sub-reddits. At the same time, there were purely algorithmic search engines (yahoo, google, etc.).
The algorithmic approach won, but aggregators still exist.
The author has a specific issue in mind. Today the author chooses joy and refuses to evoke the woe and worries of the audience thus omitting their concerns; the audience fails to inherit the author’s optimism, likely due to some kind of asymmetry in sociopolitical outlook and status between the two parties.
HN is succumbing to the discordant trends in common discourse found elsewhere online. Demographic changes may have something to do with this.
Until 2 years ago, software engineering appeared to be an ideal career: strong demand for talent combined with high salaries. But with the productivity gains promised (and often achieved) with coding agents, people are understandably afraid. And people who are afraid take defensive measures: denial, anger, excessive criticism, etc. AI becomes, in some sense, “the enemy.”
I think that better explains the shift in overall tone.
The problem lies in the HN comments which have taken that title and interpreted it through the lens of unrelated political arguments: class warfare, anti-offshoring, etc. etc. I don't think any title would be immune from these people. They're just angry because the Internet has its hooks in their brain, and they're going to post about it.
His points are good and people would be wise to read the article and take them to heart. His key points are:
1) If you're a rent seeker, current trends will probably see you lose out to a bigger and more powerful rent seeker. He's probably right about that.
2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you.
None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait.
HN has better moderation than a lot of places but from my vantage point the entire Internet is sinking into this garbage - we're more aware of the problem these days, at least, but everything and everywhere is more consumed by political hot takes than ever before.
If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!
> 2) Creating more value than you consume is a great form of self-preservation, when you do this no one wants to get rid of you.
> None of it's political. It's just good advice for life. I hereby forbid the masses from responding to these points with political rage bait.
They’re both tautologies. No new or useful info to glean. I didn’t need some highly intelligent security researcher to explain these things that are explained by intuition by anyone with an above room temp IQ.
There must surely be more to this, and given how many of his other recent blogs are a mix of political rant and a screed against da haterz. I suspect it’s a lot more political on his side than you think.
> If there was tech that forced commenters to read the article before they could comment on it - now THAT would be a valuable innovation!
lol, gotta love people who whine about HN quality and then just write pointless crybaby paragraphs like this. If you can’t beat em, join em I guess.
That’s also close to the YC motto: “make something people want”.
Or as Paul Graham puts it: be good. https://paulgraham.com/good.html
Nah. Humans can be boring too. No one wants to consume AI art in any form because art isn't just about what it is, but also how it came to be. We care about art and history because those things involved humans. And we like understanding the takes of our fellow humans. We don't care about the take of a statistical model on the topics of art and creativity.
It does not matter what license I put up. It doesn't even matter if I make it publicly available or not. LLMs have been trained on pirated material, they don't even have the decency to buy a copy. Even if I show my project to no one and just have a private repo on Github the code might still be used to train LLMs.
Your GPL licensed library? Yeah, we used claude to rewrite it and released it under MIT.
Now that wouldn't be so bad. One could argue copyright has long held back progress in certain areas. The problem is, the rules only apply one way. The rent seeking oligarchs of the tech industry can steal everything but I can't.
They can just eat the cost of a lawsuit, I can't. They can just decide to make a special deal with Disney to use their copyrighted material, I can't.
Sure the days of free markets capitalism are long gone. A few monopolists controlling the market has long been the norm. But AI makes it even worse. So much worse.
Nowadays AI companies have more money and lawyers than most movie studios, so
I predict that there will be a billion dollar company/ies (probably exist even now in stealth mode), whose business model will be to slopfork existing software - after all AI has proven to be very capable at that.
With trillions of dollars both supporting and opposing this business model, something will probably change in some way wrt copyright, and hopefully in a way that's an improvement to the average person.
Given the current political and economic environment, I wish I had the sort of optimism to believe any changes in the law would benefit the average person.
Good. "You" made the world a better place at the expense of "me", the rent-seeking GPL author. I can go suck it if nobody wants my equivalent product with a worse license anymore. How do people not get this? If AI enables somebody to reproduce somebody else's hard labor much more cheaply, then it should do so instead of holding everyone else to ransom just because some self-entitled programmer wants to prevent competition when he's falling behind the market.
If you're a programmer, you have no moral right to complain about that because it's also the whole point of computer software. To do things more cheaply - ie to make somebody else's work worthless.
Delete your github repos and operate your own gitolite instance. Feed vibecode to GitHub so the LLMs coprophagically train on their own slop.
I guess you're safe with a privately self hosted project that you only share with people who don't have any AI and won't reshare it.
Then again, if you even distribute only binaries then in theory the AI could copy those and reverse engineer them, or just mutate the binaries.
Someone needs to build an easy to run AI agent that does that automatically, maybe with strategically bad choices (like complex no-op tests, bad algorithms, introduction of security vulnerabilities described as fixing them). I'd run it. Maybe it could even star/interact with other slop repos, so low activity couldn't be used as a filter.
No one knows what he is actually saying (see comments) but at least he managed to compress the entire discourse on AI impact into a blog post.
These are confusing times for engineers as the automators can now automate themselves away at even greater speed. Reminding ourselves to play positive sum games seems relevant.
The cake is too small to divide with humans and AI. We all feel that. Time to make more cakes :)
From my experience this isnt in the slightest bit true.
The professional managerial class not only sucks at identifying who creates value, they often feel threatened by those who do and try to knock them down a peg, disenfranchise them or commoditize them somehow.
You might assume that that the profit incentive would override this tendency towards shredding economic value but it doesnt, because of the principal-agent problem. The PMC always prioritizes their power within the organization over the organization's maximization of profit.
At least half of the hype about AI is about trying to gaslight developers into believing that theyre now worthless so that they can be more easily exploited by the PMC.
It was the same thing back when outsourcing to Actual Indians was in fashion in the 2000s.
Do we really think these billions of debt generatjon is anything else?
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Is this guy just paying bots to upvote and promote his stuff?
If you don't worry about the returns, you won't get any.
There are circumstances where that is fine. Be sure you're in one of them first.
1. create value, then
2. capture some of that created value.
Some people want to skip step 1.
Some bigco jobs have felt that way to me: I don't know if I'm actually creating anything valuable, but I'm getting paid. I think the people who are most anxious right now are the ones who suspect they're not really creating anything of real-world value, and they're terrified that they're about to stop getting paid as well.
It's definitely indicative of an unhealthy organization or society when this happens but generally I've still found this to be the norm.
Indeed, maybe one of the reasons why free market capitalism functions is because it has a built in check (bankruptcy) against this natural human organizational tendency.
I think a large part of why software devs were so well compensated in the last decade was because we were helping build the systems which made the capture of value more efficient (whether from taxi drivers, smbs, property rentals or whatever), not because we were facilitating its creation.
Geohot seems to be telling people to do the opposite. Maximise value and don't consider returns.
Is it hyperbolic yes? Is it perfectly acceptable opinion to have and post on your own blog? Yes.
I think sometimes we all get caught in the I don't agree with them entirely. get him!! Online.
Might take a while but the milk surely becomes butter. His point is valid, maybe your pov is a bit clouded because his baseline is quite high (fame, money) but its not that different at a lower baseline. You bring 1.x to the world that fights over a deemed finite set with 0.x tools.
you can create value by preventing damage in the future, this will get rewarded by the ecosystem itself. That's really hard to describe, but you can try simply removing a danger or annoyance in an ecosystem like your hood or local park then be attentive about what will be better in your own life.
Art creates value with measurable 1.9x in my country, its studied and thus gets funding because they know every 100€ funded will create 190€ of economic value. This means if you give an artist 100€ doesn't matter how - the local economy will grow by 190€. Magic? Well it's just many soft factors - higher quality of life leads to more educated and productive people!
Understand these are all tools to make more of WHAT IS ALREADY THERE and has nothing to do with extracting resources and selling them or bartering. I think your dotcom bubble is an extreme with no value for general advice.
Hope this helps. Hang tight!
For them to survive, they have to have got returns from somewhere - maybe welfare, inheritance, a day job. Someone has to have worried about the returns so they can be free from thinking about it.
And if you don't worry about returns, you will let someone extract it ruthlessly from you, that you contribute millions of value to a company that gives you nothing back. This may be fine to you at some level, but many of the people who you allow to exploit you use the resources they gain as leverage to further their selfish ends, like a certain richest man in the world who helped a certain politician buy an election at the most powerful country in the world.
He was focusing on value, not returns.
That being said, his take is still a dumb take - if you focus on creating value you may not capture any of that value for yourself. If you don't capture that value, someone else certainly will.
The age of creating value for the public good is well and truly over - any value you create for the public good in the form of intellectual output is immediately captured by profit-maximising companies for training your replacement.
It's not just a case of having your value captured by someone else, the AI corps are actually taking your captured value and then using it against you.
“Creating value” in open source has never been about capturing value at all, it’s always been about volunteering and giving back, and recognising the unfathomable amount of open-source software that runs the modern world we live in
“Capturing value” is the opposite of this, wall-gardens, proprietary API’s, vendor lock-in, closed-source code… it’s almost antithetical to the idea of open source
I disagree; the GPL has always been transactional. You capture the value in your product by ensuring improvements come back to you. The user "pays" by not being able to close the product off.
It's not a zero sum game. Someone putting my open-source contributions (for example) in their dataset isn't subtracting value from me, or the rest of society.
If my employer can't see or don't care about the value I bring, I simply go to one who values me higher. I refuse to participate in office politics and that kind of BS.
I work on a product, I see sales generated by my work. By me specializing in my role and sales specializing their role we both benefit. Is that outsourcing the the worries? I don’t know, but when we get a client email it’s both product and sales collaborating that resolves it.
There are also co-ops, worker owned companies, etc.
So my interest is that they recognize that I provide value, and pay me accordingly. It's possible that they recognize my value but choose to underpay.
I want them to pay me as much as possible, they want to pay me as little as possible. We reach a compromise, and if a different company offers a better deal I take it. That's their incentive to pay me a competitive salary. Doesn't matter what I say or how well I play office politics, they are most likely going to try to get a bargain and I am most likely going to leave for a better deal because there's always someone willing to pay more.
I don't remember ever learning a theorem stating that computers cannot surpass humans.
There's an AI "smell" to things that are generated. Why is that? Mode collapse is impossible to see from a small number of samples. Are we mode collapsing society? How would we know if we were?
Also, will computers surpass humans has such an implicit bias in it. Have humans surpassed ants? Have ants surpassed rocks? Have jet planes surpassed teletubbies?
The no free lunch theorem is so absurdly limited because of the constraints that it's IMO a tautology and fundamentally irrelevant outside of exceptionally tiny areas. You can't have one search algorithm that's better than others on average when searching entirely random things with no structure? 1. Yes, obviously. Nice to have a formulation but it's not exactly a surprise and 2. That's not what we deal with in the real world.
Have ____ surpassed teletubbies?
Can always be answered in the affirmative.
Unfortunately for most people, there's plenty of companies willing to take the returns and leave you paycheck to paycheck. That's literally what they are optimized to do.
I don't even disagree with the ideal, but I think a prerequisite step to this philosophy is UBI.
from the same author
He has a point, certainly. But while he is harping about the U part of ubi, he's completely ignoring the B part. UBI is meant to provide some basic income so people don't starve. It's just an optimization of welfare programs where you have a ton of bureaucracy and make people jump through endless hoops and cause them endless amounts of stress (which is known to make people work less, not more). And replace it by just giving all citizens the same amount.
Yes, that's a bit stupid for the people first paying taxes and then getting them right back again minus overhead costs, but if you think about it: that's what happens now too, only less efficient (in the netherlands, that is) so you pay even more overhead.
On top of that comes the other realization: If the current trend of automating everything continues,we'll ultimately end up with (hyperbole) 1 person owning all the machines doing all the work. That 1 person earning all the money, and (in an ideal case) paying his taxes to give everybody else welfare. Which just is the same as UBI.
In a certain way this already happens now. Most not-too-smart people that used to be gainfully employed as laborer somewhere are now on welfare, and the threshold for not-too-smart could go up rather steeply with the current AI trends.
I'm not sure this is stupid. I think the people against the negative income tax system are kind of stupid. Like, the best place to apply the welfare rules is where all other complicated rules about income are made: the tax office (IRS). If you decide that for whatever reason you really really want people receiving welfare to be second class citizens, you'd go out of your way and build a separate welfare office, where all the work the tax office is doing gets to be duplicated for no reason other than so you as a working class citizen can pay even more money to be angry at the second class citizens.
Overall, it sounds kind of stupid. You build a bureaucracy that designates people as a special class, so that this special class is difficult to escape from, since if everyone was a continuous recipient of welfare, there would be no second class and "escape" would merely be progression through the simple passage of time.
The dumbest arguments I've seen are extremely cranky and boil down to rich people becoming net beneficiaries of CO2 dividends, because they spent tens of thousands of dollars on EVs, heat pumps, cycling, insulation, solar panels, etc so they can get 100% of an annual 100€ CO2 dividend. Like, giving 100€ to even a single rich person is such a horrific crime, that it's better if everyone else, who actually needs it, should get less than the 100€ even if that reduction will result in hundreds of millions of € being diverted away from people who actually need the money to compensate their CO2 taxes.
You cannot make UBI work from money saved by removing means testing. Even UBI is a welfare scheme and would require significant bureaucratic hoop jumping to check that a person claiming it isn't:
• Dead
• Non-citizen
• Already claiming it under a different name/bank account/etc
• In prison
• Moved abroad
and so on. All that is expensive, and yet the overheads of even existing welfare systems just aren't high compared to the amounts they pay out. Getting rid of means testing doesn't magically make the numbers balance.
Geohot is correct. UBI seems to only appeal to people who don't understand how the economy works. You can't have an economy in which one person earns all the money by definition.
In my country the people that are producing and selling eggs do it almost for free, they could do something else and get much more money, but they choose to do eggs. My theory is that people choose to do stuff not just because of the money. Narrowing all the interests to just money doesn't capture the complex reality. When you cancel the money thing, you let people choose what to do based on their real ambitions and aspirations, removing the alien interest (money) that skews the world so much that even geohotz got confused.
Apparently if we, the poorer ones, win the war of attrition, the problematic ones that own everything will resign to golf. Or something. Getting financial planning from a lottery winner.
Isn't that exactly what Anthropic did to the SaaS sector? Taking the "I can replace you with a very small shell script" line from BOFH lore (except that it was a bunch of SKILLS.md files, not shell scripts) and making it real.
This is broadly in line with OP's suggested ethic "create value for others, don't play zero sum games" since capitalism is based on rewarding those who create the most value, whereas zero-sum games are largely political in nature.
Cash just about never sits just around as long as whoever holds onto it has no current need for extremely liquid assets. Like insurances.
I doubt that the ratio of cash that ends up bound up that way to the one that doesn't changes a lot overall.
The real problem to UBI is governments creating income via debt, IMO.
A good example of a country in a downward spiral towards UBI hell is the UK. Around 25% of the working-age population now claim to be disabled, and around 10% receive disability benefits. Labour have a genius idea for how to fix this: let disabled people try out employment for a bit to see if they like it, whilst keeping their welfare payments. So they're turning disability benefits into UBI by the back door.
The UK can't afford anything even close to this. It can't even afford the theoretically non-universal benefits schemes it has: it has massive government debt and deficits because its economy doesn't generate enough wealth, and its health welfare system (the NHS) experiences Soviet-style shortages all the time.
This has happened despite that we've been mass automating jobs with computers and robots for decades. Chips aren't magic wands that make communism suddenly work. The problems with wealth redistribution are fundamental and will never go away regardless of your level of technology.
If you disagree, fine, but please for the love of God focus on walking before you can run. Drive government deficits to zero whilst keeping growth at US levels, and then talk about more generous welfare schemes.
(you can't magic new money by eliminating means testing either, see my other comment on this thread).
I may do it too, but I don't think I'd actually ever write it down.
Paycheck to paycheck is sort of fine, if you can still dedicate the time to your WoW clan, or your music, or your writing, and be happy about that. Well, to your kids, not expecting anything tangible in return.
If the day job expends all motivation, all your energy, and it + the commute eats all your time, then again it's an inadequate job.
This is some truth to this argument, but the frequency with which it's brought out as an excuse to just dismiss any argument one doesn't like is too high in North America.
Simply bashing every argument with, "but some people are in a bad situation" doesn't really further discussion all that much.
No matter how much resources a society has, natural selection pushes everyone to keep trying hard to get more, as those that don't end up without resources.
In a society, the fastest way to get resources is to provide something in exchange to other members of the society. The most common thing we have to exchange for resources is work.
From those two things we can see that no matter what society you have or how wealthy it is, people will work as much as they can, or else they get behind in the rat race.
Unless for those who can afford not worrying about money, of course.
The general premise of a UBI is that it's unconditional.
If you tried to say someone is required to produce something without specifying what it is, they'll produce whatever is the easiest thing to produce, which will naturally be useless if they otherwise wouldn't have produced anything because the only reason they're doing it is to satisfy the demand of someone not imposing any specific requirements on the output.
But if it's actually unconditional then the things produced would only be the things someone wants to produce, i.e. the things worth their time to produce when they're not actually required to spend their time producing it. Those things would tend to be useful because at least the author found them to be and there's a decent chance they're not unique in the world. If you e.g. make an app just because you want to use it yourself, maybe someone else wants to use it too.
This seems reasonable on it's surface, however for anyone that is tried to start a business, or sell anything, there is a big gap here.
The gap between creating something useful (an app) and the ability to sell or market it is HUGE. That gap is the difference between useful or not.
So I agree, lots of "useless" stuff will be made because the drive to close that GAP (which looks small) won't be done because there is no need for it.
UBI might fuel some useless work, but it also might provide a way to people to be more into creative side of things rather than selling and marketing rat race.
Also in less developed countries money even less corresponds to value. It almost always has some kind of mafia and corruption that extracts huge portions of value from the economy and basically net negative, though profitable.
I'd like to live in the world where money are always allocated fairly, but we see that in IT, for example, predating, stealing data, spying on people bring more money than the honest work due to misaligned incentives, when bad actors pay more money than actual consumer.
It is easy to find examples of money not being a judgement of value in practice: think about thief or extortion for example, or pushing drugs.
Also, I find the online discussion around UBI to be quite weird. I don't think anyone serious is advocating for it to be particularly high. In my opinion, UBI should cover your necessities plus some so you can participate in society. This gives everyone the opportunity to take it slow or focus on personal projects without fear. Everything luxurious can not, and should not, be affordable with UBI. This will leave ample opportunity for people to still care about and want to work.
Humans will always do. It is in our nature. But not letting people get homeless or starve to death might enable those of us that don't want to do what our overlords deem useful to do the things our society so desperately needs. I don't need some poor fool to cook my burger for me. I'd rather take turns with my friends that now have free time.
There is a problem with "plus some so you can participate in society"
In a massive society this will never be agreed to. The 'some' here will never be enough. Too little and it's not UBI, too much and impossible to fund. Who is going to define what a luxury is? Is owning your own home a luxury, a car, washer and dryer?
This bias towards creating value makes them more moral than mere mortals, creating huge amounts of innovation and surplus value.
I have a hard time interpreting that as what geohotz is saying. If anything it seems to promote rent seekers by telling you - stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
I was wondering if that would come up and HN delivers without fail. Anyway, you are free to interpret it as you see fit.
The guidance was for someone who was struggling with a moral dillema on facing relatives in war and undecided over action. It is not a diktat to work or provide unquestion labor.
For anyone who understood the whole story and backdrop of the situation, a reasonable interpretation is
- you are responsible for your actions but you cannot control the consequences of your actions due to many factors.
- When you detach yourselves from results, you can do your job without anxiety.
- do not let the fear over results be an excuse for inaction.
Give it a read and decide for yourselves if you are not convinced. Even without the teachings part, the whole story of Gita is actually an epic story/novel with some strong and conflicted characters with elaborate back stories.
> stick to your lane and don't complain. I.e. the caste system
That verse is quite famous and the general interpretation as I understand is this.
You have control on your actions but not on its results. The results depend not only on your actions but on many other factors outside of your control.
Now, one can interpret that it is instruction to "stay in your lane", but I have not seen that interpretation so far in my life in India.
In that context the quote is about performing the duties you were born to do without overthinking the consequences.
i completely agree with you and the post you are replying too. both are correct.
What others do is actually irrelevant to the argument.
If what you are good at can be easily automated... be curious, grow, and get good at other things you can provide more value in. These are usually adjacent to what you're already good at.
Also, the timeline isn't 'the next few years' or 'the past', but 'your entire life.'
If I used to provide some value X in a day, and that was enough to cover my consumption for the day, but now others are providing the same value X in 5 minutes, it will not be enough to cover my consumption for the day anymore
We don't all sit at typewriters anymore either, but former typists found other ways to provide value, I'm certain, and didn't just disappear and become homeless (the vast majority of them, anyway).
Once upon a time, we had armies of secretaries that secretly (well, not so secretly) were the backbone of every institution. We don't have that anymore either, since computers replaced many of them.
Computers were originally people. They also got bested by new technology.
None of those people disappeared or became destitute; they adapted, and they found new ways to create more value. (Or, it's possible some ended up working for rent-seeking corporations, which is a different point)
Maybe a part of the anxiety is the realization that much if what was delivered by well-paid people before AI is actually not something the very same people want to consume?
They're just producing what I produce, i.e software.
That's the most interesting thing - in 99.9% they don't. All their value is negated by lowering code base quality, pushing slop to prod ("but code reviews..." - don't help sorry, unless you spent a long time getting to understand a problem - simply reading a solution gives only false confidence that you understood it - you didn't, not fully). E.g. see all the outages at amazon, cloudflare, etc.
Quick short term wins lead to big longer term losses - and this is already happening.
The issue is - its basically impossible to make decision makers see this as this requires many years of expertise in tech, and it is very not obvious, and sounds like you just don't want to rely on AI to replace you etc etc.
While selling AI is easy - "look! it did this feature in 5 minutes! so much productivity".
Workers should generally aim to unionize and seek to capture more of their value through worker-owned co-ops.
The median salaries for skilled trades aren’t great. You can make good money if you are willing to work a ton of overtime, or if you can manage to get one of the very limited union spots in the right city. Or if you become a business owner (and accept the corresponding risk) and mostly manage other skilled employees.
It’s also not a viable solution for more than a small percent of the population. Let’s say AI comes along and forces 25% of the white collar workers out of a job, there is only enough room in the skilled trades to handle a tiny fraction of those displaced workers.
That’s ignoring what massive unemployment does to salaries in the trades. And the fact that to make decent money in the trades you need years of working for peanuts first. And if you think age discrimination is a problem in tech, try breaking into the trades as a gray beard. The entry level jobs are built on the assumption that you are 20 years old and can do 12 hours of hard physical labor without needing a week off to recover.
Again it’s not impossible, it’s just not a solution at any kind of scale.
Yeah, this is not going to happen. New job positions will open up instead, and white collar workers will be well placed to fill them since supervising an AI agent swarm is not that different from supervising the work of other humans - which is what white collar workers do as their job.
But until you get to the very top of those professions, the work environment is worse in every way.
You’re working 2x as many hours for 1/4 the pay, you go back to work the day after your kid is born. Your knees are just absolutely fucked. It’s in no way an equivalent job. That’s the primary reason tech workers don’t want to do it.
For example geohot could be vastly richer than he is if he wanted to. He wisely chooses not to, and advises others to do the same.
Fix: Forgot to add /s switch.
This comment uses conventional commits.
If you must hold the context for 8 agents in your head at once, your expertise as an engineer is wasted.
See https://emsh.cat/one-human-one-agent-one-browser/ - One man + one agent in 72 hours, did better than thousands of agents over weeks.
Staying focused on one or two important tasks still works. You won't fall behind.
This strategy is highly effective but it's also difficult to tolerate as an ordinary advanced ape. Watching others play less noble games and obtain easier wins can be discouraging over time.
I have found that the less you care about money the easier it is to acquire. Risk aversion, greed and interpersonal drama will kill a good idea way before anything else. I sometimes like to reframe this one as "100% of $0 is still $0".
For example, when I'd joined a company I did not get any travel expenses. They expected me to pay the 200 euros a month myself. I'd suggested it and they shrugged it off. The company is now firing people and others are leaving.
The current company just has a default rate of money you get per km. They don't need to, but they know people want this and will ask about it.
Its a small example but it gives you a view of how a company operates
They keep resources (money) at zero by spending them frequently unless they have something more expensive and more urgent to buy.
They are greedy because they want to pay the same amount (or less if possible) for better units (or upgrade them), which is why technology can be more urgent than creating more units.
They are very risk averse, but don't look like it. The more talented a player is, the more risky some of his decisions or actions may appear, but they're not riskier when you take talent into account. That being said, they do sometimes make very bold moves, even in tournaments, because they think the opponnent is not going to expect it.
Alright time to go back to being a villager.
That sounds cool but hasn't been my experience at all. I used to care about money, and used to earn well. These days I care less about money (which I can afford to, precisely because I used to care about money) and earn an order of magnitude less.
A noble man that spends all his time jealous of the things the men without scruples have is not so much far from doing what they did. It's also what the men that did it before him told themselves "why play the right game if everyone else doesn't".
> If you don’t use this new stupid AI thing you will fall behind. If you haven’t totally updated your workflow you are worth 0.
When I see this on any social platform, that is a sign that a VC / investor already invested or likely over-invested in said product and is manipulating emotions to shill their portfolio companies.
This is a tired tactic repeated and recycled tens of thousands of times over and over again and the first sense is to ignore them.
> That said, if you have a job where you create complexity for others, you will be found out. The days of rent seekers are coming to an end. But not because there will be no more rent seeking, it’s because rent seeking is a 0 sum game and you will lose at it to bigger players.
This is why many here are realizing the uncomfortable truth about why complexity over simplicity was celebrated. Of course job security.
But it turns out that the low hanging fruit at those companies that added close to no value LLMs were enough to achieve "AGI" internally; (meaning layoffs in this case).
The jobs of knowledge workers will still be there, but the big money just went into data centers (and not overpaying for more knowledge workers).
The truth is in the middle.
I hit this with my multi-agent system — 8 agents sharing a JSONL knowledge graph. Parallel writes caused a race condition: two agents read the same file state, both write back the full graph plus their additions, second write silently obliterates the first. Sometimes the file ends up with a half-written JSON line that breaks every subsequent read.
I patched it with an async mutex and atomic writes, but the real lesson was that I was fighting my runtime. On the BEAM, a GenServer processes messages from its mailbox sequentially — there's no concurrent access to serialize because the execution model is already sequential per-process. Supervision trees handle the crash case: child process dies, supervisor restarts it in microseconds, auto-repair runs on init, agents resume with clean state. Each process is ~2KB with its own heap, so you can run thousands with full isolation.
At 69 agents the coordination and fault tolerance problems get significantly harder. The BEAM was designed for exactly this — Ericsson ran millions of concurrent processes on telephone switches with nine nines of uptime using these patterns 40 years ago.
Wrote up the full story (race condition mechanics, supervision strategies, real code): https://dev.to/setas/why-erlangs-supervision-trees-are-the-m...
I hit this with 8 agents sharing a JSONL knowledge graph. Parallel writes caused a race: two agents read the same state, both wrote back a full graph, and the second silently overwrote the first. I patched it with an async mutex and atomic writes, but the real lesson was that I was fighting my runtime.
On the BEAM, a GenServer processes its mailbox sequentially, so this class of shared-state bug largely disappears. Supervision trees also give you the part agent demos usually skip: when something crashes at 3am, it comes back clean instead of corrupting the rest of the system.
That ended up being the more important property than raw agent count.
I suspect "going recursive" often colloquially means that AI systems achieve their exponential growth without human software engineers in the mix. This is a moment whose sudden apparent nearness does justify some of the ramping rhetoric, in my opinion.
Influence is even more so -- it's common to have situations where nobody is truly paying attention to anyone else. The people with good ideas can't get any traction, and the whole organization just spins in circles, lurching from one externally-imposed crisis to the next. If the people who gain influence use that influence to promote others who are worth paying attention to (and thus they gain influence), everyone benefits. But if you measure that in terms of how many minutes each person gets to speak at the All Hands, it's zero-sum.
Is there such a thing as "partially zero-sum"? I mean, to express how, unless you get really creative in difficult ways, the supply of land is under pressure due to other people taking all the currently useful parts of it, such as the parts on your island and not underwater.
The Asia, Africa & the Americas have so much unused space that isn't as inhospitable as central Australia
There is lots of "unused space" in places like Alaska or Siberia or deserts or mountains, but land is not a fungible commodity. Unused space is unused for a reason. In practice, almost all ownership of land is a zero sum game.
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other:
High and low rest upon each other;
Voice and sound harmonize each other;
Front and back follow one another.
Therefore the sage goes about doing nothing, teaching no-talking.
The ten thousand things rise and fall without cease,
Creating, yet not possessing.
Working, yet not taking credit.
Work is done, then forgotten.
Therefore it lasts forever.
Create more value than what I cost, otherwise why are you paying me?
1. Build tools/libraries that empower superior execution performance. If you can execute faster than others you have more potential free time than them. This is a form of compound interest. I do this for myself but my output is not exclusive to myself.
2. Be operational. Create products that are always more durable than what is trendy, but when something does break return a resolution as rapidly as possible, provided excellent regression testing. Be constantly healthy, healing once injuries are found, and constantly aware of new injuries.
I find most people cannot do those two things. Most people cannot measure things and a great many people fear novelty.
Case in point: how many here have heard of Mick Ronson?
Few perhaps. However most have heard of David Bowie.
See, Ronson was silently creating value for Bowie. Didn’t even get credited although songs like Life On Mars are what they are thanks to his contribution.
Mick was creating value while everyone one else was getting rich.
What is it, man?
If that stops being the limiting factor, then we’ll be in a post-scarcity world.
This explains the panic. It describes most roles in big tech.
Reminds me of Manfred Macx' attitude in the novel Accelerando by Charlie Stross
Anybody have examples?
I'd also argue it's not very effecicient : we are at our best when we have deadlines and clear targets to reach, and making money to pay the bills can be a very motivating one to stop procrastinating !
I'd argue we are at our best when those deadlines and clear targets are intrinsic rather than extrinsic, and that intrinsic motivation of that sort is actually more efficient than extrinsic, as it keeps you going much longer.
But yes, that's not always possible and depends greatly on your circumstances.
However, it is often much more possible than people allow themselves to think.
Or something like that.
On the question of whether Hotz knows what AI can or cannot do, the answer is demonstrably "no".
Cory Doctorow explains the dynamics well in Enshittification. First they turn against their users, then their business partners, then their employees. The layoffs you are seeing are just stage 3 enshittification. If you work at a company like this, my advice is to quit ASAP. At least then you leave on your own terms.
>Varoufakis defines capitalism as a system designed to preference profit over rent.
[snip]
>The feudal era wasn't defined by the absence of profits--rather, what made feudalism "feudal" was the triumph of rent over profits. When the interest of rentiers conflicted with the aspirations of capitalists, the rentiers won. Likewise, the defining characteristic of the capitalist era was not the abolition of rents, but rather the triumph of profits. When capitalism's philosopher-theorists lionized "free markets," they didn't mean "markets that were free from regulation," they meant "markets that were free from rents."
[snip]
>This is Varoufakiss technofeudalism exemplified. It's an economic system in which the majority of value is being captured by people who own stuff, at the expense of people who do stuff.... The fight between technofeudalism and technocapitalism is a fight over whether the landlord or the café owner takes the value that's created by the barista.
companies subsidise their products so that exploration of these products is more feasible due to lower initial costs for the end consumers. the initial consumers don't pay the full price but they are borne by the later consumers once the exploration is done and they have knowledge about that market and business.
Cory Doctorow also probably confuses democratisation and enshittifaction - its usually the case that products get cheaper by also marginally reducing the quality. we get cheap goods from China but that's not enshittification - that's just efficiency. as a consumer I'm happy I have the option of paying low prices for products.
i wouldn't take this person too seriously because it looks like they don't understand the larger picture
Apple's 30% tax for payments in apps is the ultimate rent seeking example though. Want to install your own apps, lol you can't. And if big AI companies follow in the steps of Google/Facebook it's bad for everyone. Let's recognize it and prevent it from happening this time.
So geohot's argument is that Anthropic, for example, who want to regulate AI (presumably favorably for themselves) are such an example. I don't actually think I agree, but I agree that the behavior looks similar on the surface.
Most of the US ones are. Anthropic is the worst offender.
The Chinese AI model providers like DeepSeek are not.
The argument is that if you do that, returns will naturally come your way.
The issue is that many people never provide surplus value at all; some can't, and that is obviously completely acceptable (people who are disabled, have medical conditions, or who for some other reason cannot). But those who are able and choose not to provide surplus value are who he's talking about.
You may not agree, and that's okay, but that's the argument.
And to a lesser degree, I have been doing nothing but providing value. All my projects are free/libre, yet returns have not come my way at all. In fact people who could make returns come my way, for example by offering me a job that I am clearly well suited for, refuse to take a look at these projects.
Perhaps the argument is also about non-financial returns, and things like friendships, but I don't feel especially well connected either, even though I try to help anyone I can help in the areas I am active in.
I don't think the argument matches reality, unfortunately.
At a personal level you can live your life similarly, add value where you can. You can do that by joining an organization that adds value as well.
When it starts to feel like work, it starts to feel like needing wages for it.
Often though, this position is highly subjective and mental in nature. A homeless man could willingly give his food away, and still somehow be fine with that, if he believes that things will be fine regardless somehow (perhaps he has an alternative source of food, or sincerely doesn't think that skipping food once will set him back forever). At the other hand, someone with a difficult and tedious job that pays well may not feel like they have the time or energy to give without necessarily receiving anything in return, even though they may objectively be in a much better overall position for it.
I guess altruism necessarily requires some other essential basic needs to be in abundance first before it can overflow.
In Europe we like to sit there and eat breakfast like a pleb. After enjoying that, we build a million Euros company. Maybe or maybe not. Who cares if the breakfast is good.
The barrier to being able to add any value along the supply chain is shriking daily, meaning that very few people can actually add value.
The people that have managed to get on top of the system by these mean rarely aknowledge that their methods don't scale, which is a terribly irresponsible and ultimately narcissistic way to use their ideological influence.
If you give advice to a group, it should either scale to most of the group or aknowledge up front it's exceptionalistic.
Better advice would be stay hungry, stay curious, keep learning.
A more conspiracy minded version of myself might suggest there’s an active attempt to break the politically active middle class. Subtle changes in messaging that have been happening over the past few years from business owners and politicians seem to suggest that the future will involve masses of poverty. Gone are the days of “hard work” and “meritocracy” and they have been replaced by beef liver and romanticization of peasantry
slightly naive take when the author recognises that AI will cause productivity increase.
> If you have a job like that, or work at a company like that, the sooner you quit the better your outcome will be.
AI will render your job to be rent seeking. Like self driving cars will automate away truck drivers - do you not think they need to be laid off because of AI?
geohot is talking about AI has its limitation and that it won't truly replace the human yet. Truck drivers and some people who contribute net positive value are not rent seekers at the moment.
AI could render our jobs to be rent seeking, we don't know when.
To be mean, I’d say no—those zero-sum games are always 'positive' for the players, because the people actually foot pay the bill aren't even at the table.
Come on, we live in a globalized reality. Those insulated by the 'Dollar Illusion' don’t even realize that the true costs are being extracted from the rest of the world. These so-called zero-sum games are nothing but a sophisticated machinery of power, meticulously designed to obfuscate the truth.
But those words are just too cynical; it doesn't really make any sense.
Tomorow datasets.
Keep publishing !
A better mantra is to create value for yourself and then compound it by sharing it. Then you can't lose, yet can win even more.
They may not know that this dude was an anti-masker (with nuance) for example. This could really make them decide not to even spend too much time thinking about the passage which in theory is profound for 10 seconds but no further.
As much as ad hominem attacks are not great approaches, the one scenario I feel it's justified is in cases like this.
But seriously, I think the level of discourse has gone down considerably on HN in the last few years. I know people always say this in their forum but I think it's true.
For instance, you'll see a post about GPT. Top comments are often "I use Claude", completely irrelevant. And then when [political thing happens] you get these passive-aggressive submissions with a lot of upvotes "how to switch to Claude". It's all just so exhausting. Constantly this moral grand-standing. Here is an example:
> I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure they would allow AGI to be used for truly evil purposes, and the events of this week have only convinced me further.
Sir, this is a Wendy's
GeoHot could cure cancer, not put it in the blog post title, somewhere near the bottom, and all of HN would miss it and nobody would ever get the life saving treatment they could have gotten because of blind hatred.
As much as I disliked my interactions with him, I would rather always take someone on a per-event basis, I see his new blog post for what it is and go from there. If it's trash, its trash, otherwise, I'll acknowledge it.
I don't want HN to be another reddit where we blindly attack people.
If you're just offering the wisdom gleaned from your life experiences, they're unlikely to be more insightful that anyone else's.
Most of the noise around him is who is hiring him and who is firing him. I can't think of anything that has been attributed to him in ages.
1) You are not engaging with the content of the post at all. I would not mind if you actually articulated why you found this particular take so asinine/cringeworthy. But you don't.
2) You're unnecessarily uncharitable (the blog footer already reads "A home for poorly researched ideas that I find myself repeating a lot anyway"; there's no need to be so snarky).
He's got a winning track record. You may not agree with his politics or his morals but that's separate from his effectiveness.
Specifically he's effective at stepping outside the domain he currently operates into create inside another.
The bottom line is that the majority of people alive today have to take whatever deal they are given in a sense, as they absolutely do not have the "Luxury" of not "Playing zero sum games."
Must be nice to be rich enough to get to spout philosophical BS and not worry how you're going to pay for groceries, but most people alive these days are a lot closer to being homeless than they are to being millionaires, and quitting a job that pays their bills so they can "Provide value to a community" and not worry about how they are going to get paid just isn't even a remotely viable option.
No. This is the time to abandon naive dogooderism.
The capitalists said that they don’t need labor any more. Fine. Prepare for that potentiality by not giving jack shit away for free. That includes permissively licensed open source software. But it goes way beyond that.
In the long term maybe we can get rid of the labor-employee relation so that people who do honest work don’t have to worry about their work becoming automated. Let the ones who engage in dishonest pseudo-work (capital accumulation) worry about their pseudo-productivity becoming null and void.
I agree with what is being said: AI will consolidate otherwise nonsensical jobs/roles/companies into fewer (probably more profitable?) ones, so if there’s a time to jump ship from one of these (assuming worst case scenarios), do it while you’re employed and you can land somewhere else that’s hopefully more stable.
This to me is a fairly no-nonsense piece over all. AI itself and tools like LLM are damn good though, limitations aside. We get to do a lot of things we haven’t had time to do before.